[CLUE-Tech] Recent Gentoo install experiences?

[Adam Bultman]

Hoo, boy.  i can still remember *my* first time with gentoo..

I guess, my words are:
1.  Make sure you mount your partitions in the right spot.  You don't 
want a 50 GB /boot partition and a 100 MB / partition.
2. Don't ever do a make etc-update and let it change all conf files (it 
is a lot easier, but you'll find that make.conf, fstab, etc are all gone)
3.  If you have failures with one particular stage, you can always try 
another stage
4. Don't expect a bootable system in an hour, it will take 3-6 for a 
stage one install to be finished.
5.  You'll need to use the command line tools (unless updated since my 
last install) to set up X;
6.  You can emerge a lot of things at once - queueing them up into a 
great big command line - and let it run all night.
7.  genkernel is your friend.
8.  Openoffice takes about 11 hours to compile on my 1.5 GHz Athlon - 
don't do that until the very end. (KDE is a snorer too)
9. Kernel 2.6 can make compiling easy while you do other things on the 
system.

Gentoo is a lot of fun.  Things rarely, if ever, break when I make -u 
world (unless I do something stupid) and usually any compile failures 
during an emerge can be overcome by waiting a bit unti lthose bugs are 
worked out.  I only use gentoo on my home machines.

Adam

Matthew Porter wrote:

>My son and I recently finished building a new computer for our family
>room (around an Athlon XP 2400+), and we've been putting it through
>its paces with Knoppix.  Now it's time to install our "production" OS.
>
>Most of our experience is with Debian, but we're still in a DIY kind
>of mood.  Emboldened by Collins' talk a few months ago, and by seeing
>how good the documentation is, we've decided to give Gentoo a try.
>(We can always go back to Debian if we get too many headaches.)
>
>Anyone have experience with any undocumented "gotchas" that a new
>Gentoo installer should look out for?
>
>Regardless, send some kind thoughts in our direction over the next
>few evenings...
>
> --Matt.
>
>  
>